“Now, I wrote down his schedule, Bob. Just check that if you need to. All the important phone numbers are there too. His stuff’s in this bag.” Colleen handed me the satchel and left while a little wide-eyed toddler looked up at me, as if to say, “Well, what now, Pops?”
I didn’t have a clue. We played, we ate, we watched cartoons, and the whole time he was with me, I was fascinated and terrified. When it was time to put him to sleep, I had the awful fear of him falling out of bed. I went through the house like a crazy person and grabbed every pillow and blanket I could to build a little fortress around him. He survived the night and the rest of the weekend. It felt like a milestone, and I started taking him maybe twice a month.
But I still didn’t get it. In my family, money was important. It was what conferred comfort and status, and while it wasn’t love, it was the closest thing to it. If I bought Elijah things, and if I paid what the court had deemed appropriate, I was a good father. Then I witnessed what a real father does when Flea had his daughter. He was an on-site parent from his little pad in the Fairfax District. It wasn’t the lap of luxury, but he set the bar high as a father. I wanted to be like him, but I couldn’t.
I was fucked up all the time, and one night, in one of those pensive doper moods, I had the brilliant flash that I wasn’t doing myself any good and I certainly wasn’t doing Elijah any good. He had come to visit me in rehab when he was four. It was awful. Every attempt to clean up involved a group session where the dads would talk about their children.
We’d sit in that circle, and I’d hear the laments and the boasts.
“My kids are the most important things in my life,” said one guy.
“I’d do anything for my children,” swore another.
I’d sit with my arms folded and think, What a bunch of bullshit. I wanted to shout, “If your kids meant that much to you, you wouldn’t be getting high. You’ll do anything for your kids as long as it doesn’t involve giving up drugs and booze.” My way seemed like the best path. Just disappear. Stay out of the kid’s life. Now I can’t help but think I was just a selfish asshole.
In 1996, after two dozen rides on the rehab-go-round, I felt like I was ready to reconnect. My girlfriend Max called Colleen.
“Bob’s sober. He really wants to see Elijah.”
“Oh, really? Just like the last twenty-four times?”
“He feels awful.”
“Well, Elijah’s got a baseball game. Tell Bob he can come to that.”
I was excited. I couldn’t wait. I was six weeks sober and Elijah was nine years old. It was April and the start of the Little League season. The kids all had little mock-ups of baseball cards with their pictures on the front and stats on the back. Elijah solemnly handed one to me. I kept that thing in my wallet for years. I’d look at it and it would make me cry for the years I’d lost. I started to attend all his games. By July, Colleen must have seen a change in me. Elijah started to come stay with me in my little apartment some weekends.
One day Colleen called me. “How would you like to have Elijah for the month?”
My first impulse was to panic and say, “I can’t handle something like that!” but then I remembered some advice I had just been given by a counselor as part of my recovery. “Bob, you say no to everything. It’s time you start to say yes.”
I caught myself and stammered into the phone, “B-bring him over.” Every instinct I had told me this was the wrong thing to do—I was still unsure about my sobriety—but I went with it. The visit went well and I felt as if I’d contributed to the greater good. Colleen had just started a relationship that would eventually lead to a long-term marriage. Up until then, from the time she was a girl, she had been a mother to a small child with a mostly absent, drug-addicted father. The poor girl needed to start her own life. I suggested, not long after that initial monthlong stay, that Elijah come and stay with me for a semester while he attended school. I worked and was a real dad for the first time in my life. It felt good. Elijah had two sets of actively involved parents … which couldn’t have been easy for him. When he got in trouble at school for some little infraction, we would all go down to the school for a conference.
But I worried. I could see so much of me in that kid. At eleven, he was reading William Faulkner and understanding him. And I was convinced that I had passed along an ill-defined, unhealthy mental gene. He could be a wiseass and a know-it-all, just like me. On the other hand, I could also see he was a gentleman and was kind and tolerant. He also loved music, and as he became a man, he got more into that.
He’s one of the most talented songwriters I know. He performs under the name Terrors. Of course, the music of his generation is different from the music of mine. He writes beautiful songs, but he performs them in a lo-fi style that makes it difficult to hear the lyrics. I tell him to lose the reverb and the distortion. He looks at me and smiles. I hope someday to record an album of his tunes, Songs My Son Wrote.
Like any father, I want him to be rewarded for his talent like I was for mine. For ten years, I had money, I traveled the
